and 
Background
Warhammer 40k is the worlds most popular tabletop miniatures wargame and attracts over 9000 nerds every year to empty their wallets buying overpriced figures. The Horus Heresy (HH) is a time period set in the 10,000 years before Warhammer 40k, thus it is called 30k for short. It was supposed to be about the good times before the galaxy turned to shit and war all the time, but when they decided to write 500 books about the HH it all sounded suspiciously similar to the grimdarkness of 40k.
If you don't know anything about this series I want you to read every word on this page and then click every link. I will explain no further because you're not entitled to my emotional labor sweaty. 
(https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Horus_Heresy)
Now that the final book is out and the Horus Heresy is over let's see what the fa/tg/uys on a mongolian basket weaving forum think.
Now that the most epic novel series in history has ended, what do you think about it? What is your general opinion of the Horus Heresy?
I think it's based because it made fat stacks of cash 
caring about anything besides profit motive is for lorestrags 
Kind of underwhelming, but that's more or less what I was expecting it to be.
fpbp 
It should have remained an uncertain vaguely defined mythic past. The demystification of the Horus Heresy is the single most damaging thing GW has done to the setting since its inception. And all that damage, just for a hundred books of daddy issue shlock. Jesus Christ.
Elaborating on what happened in Horus Heresy ruined the whole mood of the HH setting. Horus Heresy should've been the tales of epic battles and conflicting myths that historians had to argue on which ones were the truths. It should've been the Epic of Gilgamesh of 40k, but instead we got fricking capeshit into it.
Nerds screw everything by insisting every loose thread or unclarified apocrypha get a spin off series running twleve seasons minimum with a breakfast cereal.
(also I think they have 40k funkopops 
)
It's hilariously stupid
I read the first half dozen and a couple of others. I might read a few more of the ones that cover actually significant events rather than just treading water. Eventually. Perpetuals are still r-slurred.
They ruined more than they add, but I do enjoy the odd novels here and there. I just wish they'd lean more into the vagueness of it all, like having conflicting information between novels and characters, just to make it less a canon novel and more in-universe records of the events. Also >>91714956 is correct, Perpetual is an r-slured concept.
In case you're wondering a perpetual is an author invention where they thought inserting random human OCs that are totes immortal, and come back from the dead in a setting about constant war and dying, would be super cool and not dampen the setting or their heroic sacrifices at all. 
(I haven't read these books so don't ask me to elaborate on my smugposting about someone else smugposting)
In the end, was there some nameless soldier torn to shreds by Horus in front of the Emprah or not? I don't care enough to read 500 pages.
More or less. He's a perpetual, so he's got a lot more experience with a guardsmen (which understandably pisses a lot of people off) but he is ultimately just a guy armed with a lasgun and his balls.
Gosh, this was all a huge mistake.
The single worst thing about the series is making the setting revolve around highlander knockoffs, who have no relevance to anything outside their novels, except to be OC donut steals for the authors to mouth off with. Even though the emperor, pre-history, and arguably primarchs should have remained mysterious and ambiguous, the lore of the perpetuals sucks in its own right even prior to considering how much else they shut the door on and devalue.
For the zoomers in the audience 
this is a good point. Perpetuals are such a spectacularely tone-deaf and useless addition that it feels like a shitpost. They could not have made the feeling of the setting more awkwardly inconsistent if they had decided that every 200th person born in the Imperium has a big dildo growing out of their forehead but up till now nobody has mentioned them - now though, read all about Inquisitor dildohead and make your own dildohead space marine chapter and didn't you know that Dante has a dildo growing out of his forehead under his mask?
dildoman is living rent free 
The lore speculations as to what he was were more interesting than being told that he was just one of many randomly born highlanders who overlevelled and bit off more than he could chew in PVP with the chaos gods, because he was too toxically masculine to listen to the "earth mother" and the whiny narcissist perpetuals who critically sabotaged him.
bc he was too 
to listen to 
and 
Plus perpetuals are fricking dumb. Throw that shit in the trash. Emps should have been the last of the Men of Gold trying desperately to right the sinking ship after the DAoT. He gained huge psychic power by devouring the Sigilittes of which he spares Malcador because he defected. This allows him to be seen both as "the best of humanity" seeing as the men of gold were the best. A "shaman gestalt" if you see the Sigilittes as shaman. & a powerful relic of the DAoT in being the last truly powerful figure of that time. In my headcanon this is the best way to bring it all together. You don't need to agree with me
this is not the worst idea I've heard, and I've read a lot of trash opinions on /tg/ 
There were so many problems but these are probably the greatest ones. Black Library comes out looking so fricking mid from this series. Forget the promise of a golden, nigh-mythical age of which so much has been forgotten. Forget the promise of legendary demigods encompassing all the greatness and good of mankind falling into the rank madness of Chaos in payment for their sins, for they are just playthings of a single super-plotter who walks around with evil tattooed on his face.
Erebus and the Anathame being the prime cause weakened the entire Horus Heresy because it instantly made readers ask why couldn't someone have just realized he was a fricking sus mofo and knifed him before he did anything with the magic McGuffin. It was so damaging that they had to damage control and go "nononono, Horus was already turning on the Emperor and his brothers before this! It's not because some mook with a knife tainted him!" when, of course, that's literally how they portrayed it. And Erebus just conveniently shows up everywhere to serve as the prime motivator
Erebus and the Anathame basically read like the authors thought the audience would be too stupid to understand resentment, jealousy, ambition, and pride driving the most powerful of warlords to rise up against their father, so BL decided that they needed a real antagonist and a magic item to make plot happen at the start of the series.
Speak your truth King 
In the original (real) 40k background, Horus is an obvious Lucifer figure who takes half the angels with him instead of a third because it's a grimmer, darker, edgier setting. He was the best of the Emperor's Primarchs but comes to believe he can run things better than the Emperor himself and so turns on him. This fits with him continuing the crusade, doing all the work as far as he can see, yet being told to just turn over everything he has conquered to his father. Why? Having seen all he has seen, met the corruption of chaos on the fringes beyond mankind, being the best warlord he knows of, trusted by his men, why not conquer the Imperium for himself?
All the headcannonn the authors madeup about the Emperor making a webway is meant to explain the question the original story begged
but it replaces one problem with another
"perpetuals" one of the worst concepts introduced by the bad writers. There are multiple earlier explanations of the Emperor's origin which are better. Rick Priestly's unofficial headcanon (as it was supposed to be a mystery allowing the player to create his own story) was the Emperor was an AI from the Dark Age of Tech who needed psychic souls to run. The reason it seemed so callous was because it did completely lack sympathy. It led for mankind to survive at all costs with no consideration given the suffering of an individual imperial serf. Like Caesar's ideal for the Legion in FNV.
Another superior origin for the Emperor from earlier was a bunch of shaman, noticing how daemons born of human emotions were getting more powerful, and starting to eat them thereby empowering themselves and preventing psykers from reincarnating, performed a ritual of group-suicide, whereby they all merged in the warp to make 1 super-psyer, more powerful than any of the daemons, and reincarnate as this ubermensch.
Also, here's some gay redditors talking about the book: https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1ad2xca/just_finished_end_and_the_death_vol_iii_and_now
People spoiling it: https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1ac2nzm/the_end_and_the_death_vol_iii_spoilers_summary
People complaining they can't buy the book: https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1ac2nzm/the_end_and_the_death_vol_iii_spoilers_summary
@jannys please do the sneedful and pin this effortpost
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Wait, so the empire wasn't even halfway decent to live in before 40k? What the heck was the point, then?
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40k timeline basically goes like this
-9000 years ago some peepee commits murder, humanity doomed by space magic as a result
Today, boring
Future, good briefly
Oops AI robots rose up and killed everyone oh shit oh frick
Oops intergalactic nuclear war, earth is shithole
Oh thank god the emperor is here to save us all and genocide the non-humans
Awww shit nvm we space fascism now
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Horus Heresy was created to sell 18 more space marine factions for a game already choked with them.
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Horus heresy was always in the lore but for some reason they decided to make a whole new game based off of warhammer40k 7th edition that was only space marines so it would be perfectly balanced that nobody played yet bought the minis for to use in 40k
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It was a local maximum
The point was to make 40k players to buy more space marines.
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There was a golden age, then i think warp storms made warp travel impossible for thousands of years, then warp travel becomes possible again, the emperor shows up and begins reunifying all the colonised planets. Things would have been better pre-heresy because i dont think they had encountered any of the other tabletop factions yet except maybe orks. The existence of Chaos was a secret that not even the primarchs knew about. So they weren't in grimdark there is only war mode but it wasn't all sunshine and daisies either.
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You are thinking of the age of strife.
The golden age was the Dark Age of Technology (DAOT), this was the time when human technology was at its peak and AI was a big part of human civilization. Then you had the cybernetic AI revolt where entire suns and planets were getting devoured in the conflict by giant nanoswarms and that was just your random Tuesday across the galaxy.
For reasons unknown mankind survived the AI wars and it was after this that you had the emergence of psykers among the human species in noticeable numbers, which resulted in the age of strife when all the planets that did not exterminate their psykers had them all blow up like bombs in best case scenarios and turn into demon portals in worse case scenarios when the Aeldari empire collapsed in on itself and created a new warp rift in the galaxy during the birth of Slaanesh in real space.
Warp travel became possible again after the age of strife when the birth of Slaanesh had blown all the warp networks across the galaxy up but then there was a lull in warp space as the chaos Gods stabilized once again.
The emperor showed up around the time after the age of strife and united Earth again and stabilized the human genome which had degraded and become too mutated for a common human baseline to exist. So the emperor pretty much brought baseline humanity back from extinction. Then from Earth he conquered Mars, Luna, and the solar system, then after killing the thunder warriors started his journey of conquering across the galaxy.
Pre heresy they had encourtered Orks, Aeldari, and Necron ( as per later stories set in 40k referencing past events ). The Tau were in their stone age during pre heresy times.
One or two of the primarchs were told about demons by the emperor. They did encounter chaos but due to how stable and quiet the warp was at that point in time the few cases were deemed interdimensional aliens and shushed.
They absolutely were in grimdark there is only war mode. The difference between 30k and 40k is like the difference between WW2 Germany during its winning phase and Germany during its losing phase. The Primarchs were by default warrior generals, some of the insane and sadistic. They were busy exterminating innumerable alien species and human civilizations that either did not submit or had a genome mutation that made them deviate too far from acceptable baseline for what counted as human.
All of this is a recollection so some details might be wrong.
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Posts like this is why I do Heroine.
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Golden Age of Humanity 10k to 20k
Eldar Gangbang a God 20k - 30k = OH SHIT BIPOC
30k attempting to reclaim what was once the good shit
Its essentially the tale of white people trying to retake a major city fallen into disrepair because of minorities and drug addicts, and then it falling back into disrepair because of minorities and drug addicts because of hedonism.
So I guess San Francisco or maybe London.
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Nah, mayos opened up the warp. They ruin everything as always.
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White women: What if we just lowered the Gellar field for a second, as a treat?
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Minorities destroying cities and hedonism is when neighborhood property prices decline and I see two black guys at the same time on the street.
Toughen up kitty
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BECAUSE GRIMDARK
SELLS 
BIGOT 
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Because every option outside of it is even worse that the entire point of grimdark.
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The empire was better than getting kidnapped by torture interdimensional elves, or getting stomped by war fungus, or getting captured by multiple homicidal alien species vying for power.
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